The Odyssey movie prompted me to reread Stephen Fry’s version of the story. After the ending, Fry says:
But Odysseus’s debt to Poseidon is not yet fully discharged. The price he has to pay for poking that stick in Polyphemus’s eye is high indeed. If you recall, when he visited Hades, Tiresias told him: Finally home and in the bosom of your wife and son, scores settled and peace established at your hearth, you will immediately have to leave Ithaca, an oar on your shoulder, to search for the land whose people have never heard of the sea, who use no salt, have no understanding of ships or sailing, and do not so much as know what an oar is. When a stranger hails you there, points at the oar on your shoulder, and asks why you are carrying a winnowing fan, you are to plant the oar in the ground, make sacrifices to Poseidon and, as you make your way back home, to each of the twelve great gods in turn. Homer is of no use to us now. Instead, the major source for post-Homeric Odyssean doings is the Telegony, a lost manuscript of disputed authorship that tells the adventures of Telegonus, Odysseus’s son by Circe. 124 “Telemachus” means “warrior far away,” and “Telegonus” means “born far away.”125 Odysseus was nothing if not a remote father.
So no happy ending for Odysseus? And can’t Poseidon just let it go? His one-eyed son was happily munching on Greek warriors when Odysseus finally put a damper on it by blinding him. Does Polyphemus not bear any responsibility, for gods’ sake?
No doubt Wikipedia is useful. But it is not necessarily academic, and perhaps some people here know other things. I’d never really heard of these stories, but the amount of ancient knowledge lost to neglect must be considerable.
The thing is, the Greek myths are not one big canon. Different poets offered different versions of what happened to the various characters.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the only two fully surviving works of a much longer cycle of epics about the Trojan War (including what preceded it and its aftermath). We know about the content of these through glosses and summaries provided by Greek prose authors. For example, chronologically after the Iliad is an epic where the Queen of the Amazons (legendary warrior women) comes with her troops to assist the Greeks against Troy.
Greek myths were a combination of religion and literature / poetry. having both an oral and a written tradition. For example, quite a few traditions from the myths have come down to us through the surviving plays of the three great Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Eurypides and Sophocles. Their tragedies were dramatic works written for the City Dionysia, a festival in honor of the god Dionysus. Attending the plays was encouraged by the city as an act of worship to the god, but it offered the opportunity to see some really great drama. But here you can see different tellings expanding on the various myths.
So for example: what happened to Helen of Troy after the war? According to Homer, she and Menelaeus reconciled. According to one play by Euripides (The Trojan Women), he was resolute on executing her, though it was hinted he wouldn’t in the end. According to another play by the same (Helen), he discovered that she had actually been in Egypt all along and that the “Helen” in Troy had been only a divinely-created image. According to a further play (Orestes), she survived, and then was taken up to Olympus by Apollo to prevent her being killed by Orestes.
Or this: we all know King Laertes as the father of Odysseus. But some sources claim that his real father was Sisyphus and that Laertes had bought Odysseus from him.
So Odysseus may get a happy ending in one telling, and a not-so-happy ending in another.
There are surviving bits of the poem. Such things – generally quotations from other authors – are called “fragments”. The bits from the Telegony, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White and published in the Classical LIbrary, are actually given in their entirety online here:
(which also gives what we have of “The Returns”, another lost poem telling what happened as the Greeks tried to get back home after the Trojan War)
THE TELEGONY
Fragment #1 –
Proclus, Chrestomathia, ii:
After the “Returns” comes the “Odyssey” of Homer, and then the “Telegony” in two books by Eugammon of Cyrene, which contain the following matters. The suitors of Penelope are buried by their kinsmen, and Odysseus, after sacrificing to the Nymphs, sails to Elis to inspect his herds. He is entertained there by Polyxenus and receives a mixing bowl as a gift; the story of Trophonius and Agamedes and Augeas then follows. He next sails back to Ithaca and performs the sacrifices ordered by Teiresias, and then goes to Thesprotis where he marries Callidice, queen of the Thesprotians. A war then breaks out between the Thesprotians, led by Odysseus, and the Brygi. Ares routs the army of Odysseus and Athena engages with Ares, until Apollo separates them. After the death of Callidice Polypoetes, the son of Odysseus, succeeds to the kingdom, while Odysseus himself returns to Ithaca. In the meantime Telegonus, while travelling in search of his father, lands on Ithaca and ravages the island: Odysseus comes out to defend his country, but is killed by his son unwittingly. Telegonus, on learning his mistake, transports his father’s body with Penelope and Telemachus to his mother’s island, where Circe makes them immortal, and Telegonus marries Penelope, and Telemachus Circe.
Fragment #2 –
Eustathias, 1796. 35:
The author of the “Telegony”, a Cyrenaean, relates that Odysseus had by Calypso a son Telegonus or Teledamus, and by Penelope Telemachus and Acusilaus.
Or argue that the Marvel Comics is not one big canon, and that different writers offered different versions of what happened to the various characters.
I hate to break the news to him, but his “son” is a monstrous freak who eats people as if they were McNuggets. He must have been awfully drunk to sleep with a woman who could produce a monster like that.
Imagine that in two millennia, all that survives of Marvel Comics is the collected works of Jack Kirby. There’s tantalizing references to and fragments from comics by Stan Lee and others, but not surviving. How would that shape our understanding of Marvel canon?
That is the situation we have with ancient literature. We recognize Homer as the great Greek poet, but is that because their work is what survives to us?
Thoosa. Her siblings include the Gorgons, the dragon of the Hesperides, and the Grey Sisters (three sisters who had gray hair from their birth and “shared one eye and one tooth among them.”) Inbreeding was catching up with the gods by the time of Odysseus.
Half-siblings. The Gorgons and the Graiae were the children of Phorkys (The Old Man of the Sea) and Ketos (Cetus, the Sea Monster). I don’t know who Thoosa’s mom was, but I’ll bet it wasn’t Ketos.
As I remark i my book Medusa, the fact that there are two different sets of monstrous children who have an association with eyes, and both of whom Perseus encounters, suggests that what we have here are two slightly different versions of the same myth that got smooshed together because people thought both were too good to get absorbed into the other. The Graiae shared one eyes among them. The Gorgons, of course, could turn you to stone with a look. The multiple connections and associations can be explained pretty neatly in terms of astronomy But that’s a topic that would take too long to go into – it takes up two chapters in the book.
ElonMusk3500 17.0 will explain how ridiculous it was to claim the Real Spider-Man dressed in a blue and red bodysuit to swing through the city. He vows to come up with a new JMax version where his Fred Perry clothing is restored.
On the other hand, maybe the reason why only Homer survives is that he’s the only one whose works were actually any good.
But yeah, the comparison to comic books is pretty apt. Nerds are gonna nerd, in any era. Nowadays, they nerd out to superheoes, while back in the day, they nerded out to mythical figures. But it’s the same nerding-out. And similar stories have been told in every era in between.
Sometimes the apple falls far from the tree. The mother Thoosa was one of the more bewitching sea nymphs. Polyphemus eats cheese and goats; (McRibs are rarely in season but come in armed groups.)
The books had other Cyclopes, but Odysseus told him his name was Nobody. When Polyphemus went to complain, he said Nobody was bothering him, Nobody had hurt him, etc. I love the movie , but a bit more humour and including more invention woulda been better.
